Strange Summer Nor’Easter Drops 3 Inches of Rain in 45 Minutes Over Parts of D.C. Area

Climate change related hydrological events. Rain bombs. These are somewhat uncomfortable subjects. But it’s a basic fact that if you warm the Earth, you also crank up rates of evaporation and precipitation. And since we’ve warmed the Earth by about 1.2 C above preindustrial levels by burning fossil fuels and dumping so much carbon into the atmosphere, we’ve loaded the climate dice for producing both more extreme rainfall and more extreme drought events.

A resident of Gaithersburg, M.D., I experienced a comparable deluge situation in which my hilltop residence and home office saw a river forming in its back yard. Just about an hour before, my phone was sending me warnings to avoid the valley regions. Considering the flooding we saw in the hills, it’s tough to imagine what the low-lands might have looked like.

(Extreme rainfall creates streams through the hilltop residences of Gaithersburg, MD on July 28 as a strange summer Nor’Easter taps very high atmospheric moisture levels over the region to produce 1-4 inch per hour rainfall rates.)

It’s worth noting that 1 inch per hour rainfall rates are considered to be extreme. But the short-period volumes of rain being produced by this system (1-4 inch per hour rates) are pretty much off the charts. It’s coming from a storm that has been fueled by an upper level trough dipping down over Canada. One that pushed a large frontal system over the Great Lakes region on Wednesday night. This front then moved across the Ohio Valley on Thursday and out over the Atlantic by Friday. Packed with cooler temperatures, the front ran over ocean waters that are ranging between 1 to 4 degrees Celsius above average. The extra ocean heat helped to create a very moisture-rich environment. A coastal low subsequently forming in this very wet column of air began cranking that moisture over the mid-Atlantic even as its associated instability produced some extraordinarily powerful rainstorms.

(Sea surface temperature anomaly map shows a hot blob of ocean water temperatures off the U.S. East Coast in the range of 1-4 C above average. A deep-digging trough has enabled a strong coastal low to form and feed on the amazing amount of moisture bleeding off this warm water to produce an odd summer nor’easter and related extreme rainfall over the U.S. East Coast. A number of the factors enabling the strength of this system are aspects of human-forced climate change. Notably — the deep summer trough and the very warm Atlantic Ocean surface waters. Image source: Earth Nullschool.)

Meanwhile, the Gulf of Mexico’s warmer than normal waters have throughout the spring and summer produced tropical levels of moisture over southern and central sections of the Eastern U.S. — fueling numerous extreme rainfall events and adding even more punch to this particular event.

Already warm summer waters produce a serious amount of water vapor. But punch up ocean temperatures to the above average ranges we see today and you get even more moisture bleeding out. If an odd, deep, cool summer trough runs through it, then it provides a big kick of atmospheric instability in a region where there’s already an abnormal amount of fuel for storms. Both the ability of troughs to dig deeper over the U.S. East Coast and the added ocean heat and moisture are arguably aspects related to human-caused climate change. So to talk about this particular event without adding that context would not really be looking at the whole weather and climate picture.

87 Comments

Suzanne

Just coming up for air after an intense week of working to stop TrumpCare…and though, it has nothing to do with Climate Change…boy oh boy…did it feel good to see it go down in flames early this morning. Gives me hope that #Resistance is working…and that we can overcome the darkness that has overshadowed our Democracy since November 8th.

So, back to catching up with CC news.
Climate & Extreme Weather News (July 24th to July 27th)…

Fantastic work, Suzanne! You guys are really kicking some butt lately. Your work in helping to reveal the fact that the republicans and Trump had no good answers to providing better healthcare for the American people were essential. You’ve probably helped to save tens of thousands of lives and prevent hundreds of thousands of individual bankruptcies. Lots of work still to do. But defending against these assaults is a critical victory. Although, we shouldn’t rest on our laurels. Republicans and Trump will keep circling back on this if they have space to.

Suzanne

We’re in a good spot. We’ll be fine. Will just avoid the low areas today. Worried a bit about some of the towns and communities in the lowlands. Maryland has a boatload of rivers and streams in this area. I don’t think many towns were built with these rainfall rates in mind.

climatehawk1

Marvin Miller

I hope some Republican representatives were still in the area to experience first hand this off the charts event. Maybe a couple of them will reconsider their pledge to obey their leadership, and by extension their leadership’s obsession to be servile tools of climate change denying oligarchs.

Apparently you can pay most republicans to do anything these days. Sad that the public has been so misinformed and seems to think that democrats are cut from the same cloth. All one has to do is look at policy — and it’s black and white.

Al Gore’s new sequel apparently will take a look at this disparity and at the money still pouring in from the likes of the Kochs and Exxon that keeps corrupting both the politics and the discourse.

It was different–about 2.5 inches in a day, after perhaps a couple of additional inches in the previous two or three days, so that the ground was already pretty saturated. Lots of road damage over a modest area–maybe 50 or 75 square miles.

We are definitely experiencing occasional intense rain events, although not so much so as to be really in-your-face. Yet.

Amy

I just want to point out that, ironically, this weekend is the one-year anniversary of the devastating flood in Ellicott City, MD. 6 inches in one hour, wow. Unfortunately, for many people the party line is still that this was a one in a thousand year event. Yeah, right.

Over 3 inches of rain fell in about 45 minutes midday Friday near Silver Spring, Maryland. Water rescues were also reported near Wheaton and Garrett Park in Maryland, with multiple vehicles trapped in high water.

A landslide reported near Farquhar along westbound I-70 in Washington County, Pennsylvania. Multiple vehicles were in flooded roadways in the city of Washington, Pennsylvania.

Swift water rescues were performed in Pittsburgh Friday evening on Route 51 due to flooding in the area. Rescues were also requested in extreme northern West Virginia after people were trapped in their cars near McMechan, West Virginia outside of Wheeling.

A stream overflowed its banks and into low lying areas with several inches of water flowing over KY Highway 30 near Salyersville, Kentucky.

That’s still 3 PPM above this time last year. There was a time when I hoped-fantasized?-that we would see a few readings below 400 PPM this summer. However, it looks as though that target has been in the rear view mirror since 2015.

I don’t think we’ll see a single day below 400 ppm this year. If so, it will be an outlier. Maybe some hours will strike below the 400 ppm mark.

That weekly value is a bit of a concern. And we’ve seen a recent lag in the rate of draw-down that is usually pretty quick during July. Something to keep an eye on.

The June numbers backed off a bit with a 2.03 ppm yoy increase between June 2016 and June 2017. It did look like the annual rate was starting to edge below the 3 ppm yoy we saw in 2015 and 2016. I still think it’s likely that the July lag will round out and that we’ll see something more in the 2 ppm range for 2017. But anything above 2.5 following the past two years would be worrisome.

wili

From my perspective, this looks like the beginning of a threat of losing habitable regions in Africa. The countries are fighting as best they can — building tree walls, trying to reforest. But at a certain point, the heat and the drought of a worsening climate situation start to win out. Africa is in that battle now and the line keeps moving toward more heat and more drought.

redskylite

I would urge caution on accepting anything by author “Clive Best”, because he is quoted at the Heartland Group site and is a guest contributor to Watts Up With That. For that reason I would rather take the U.K Met office’s report seriously.

Meanwhile, about 150 miles south of Robert down in the Virginia Piedmont, we’re still creeping into drought territory (currently at “abnormally dry” according to the U.S. Drought Monitor). It seems like everything has to be an “extreme” of some sort these days.

“Conventional thinking has been that if ocean circulation weakens, reducing the transport of heat from low to high latitudes, then it should lead to sea ice growth. But we have found another, overlooked, mechanism by which sea ice actively affects AMOC on multi-decadal time scales,” said professor Alexey Fedorov, climate scientist at the Yale Department of Geology and Geophysics and co-author of a study detailing the findings in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Earlier this year, a different Yale-led study cautioned that the AMOC system was not as stable as previously thought. That study said the possibility of a collapsed AMOC under global warming conditions is being significantly underestimated.

“We’ve now found this new connection between sea ice and AMOC,” Liu said. “Sea ice loss is clearly important among the mechanisms that could potentially contribute to AMOC collapse.”

The researchers based their findings on a combination of comprehensive climate model simulations and novel computations of the sensitivity of ocean circulation to fluctuations in temperature and salinity at the ocean’s surface over time.

“In our experiments we saw a potential loss of 30% to 50% of AMOC’s strength due to Arctic sea ice loss. That is a significant amount, and it would accelerate the collapse of AMOC if it were to occur,” Fedorov said.

In the short-term, changes in the subpolar North Atlantic have the greatest impact on AMOC, the researchers found; but over the course of multiple decades, it was changes in the Arctic that became most important to AMOC, they said.

Even if humans could instantly turn off all our emissions of greenhouse gases, the Earth would continue to heat up about two more degrees Fahrenheit by the turn of the century, according to a sophisticated new analysis published in Nature Climate Change. And if current emissions continue for 15 years, odds are good that the planet will see nearly three degrees (1.5 C) of warming by then.

The new assessment by Pincus and lead author Thorsten Mauritsen, from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology is unique in that it does not rely on computer model simulations, but rather on observations of the climate system to calculate Earth’s climate commitment. Their work accounts for the capacity of oceans to absorb carbon, detailed data on the planet’s energy imbalance, the climate-relevant behavior of fine particles in the atmosphere, and other factors.

Among Pincus’ and Mauritsen’s findings:

Even if all fossil fuel emissions stopped in 2017, warming by 2100 is very likely to reach about 2.3 F (range: 1.6-4.1) or 1.3 degrees C (range: 0.9-2.3).
Oceans could reduce that figure a bit. Carbon naturally captured and stored in the deep ocean could cut committed warming by 0.4 degrees F (0.2 C).
There is some risk that warming this century cannot be kept to 1.5 degrees C beyond pre-industrial temperatures. In fact, there is a 13 percent chance we are already committed to 1.5-C warming by 2100.

“Our estimates are based on things that have already happened, things we can observe, and they point to the part of future warming that is already committed to by past emissions,” said Mauritsen. “Future carbon dioxide emissions will then add extra warming on top of that commitment.”

We are already at 1.2 C warming… We will very likely hit 1.5 C by 2023 through 2036. Given the present 492 CO2e forcing we would probably hit near 2 C by the 2090s even if this atmospheric forcing only remained constant. In order to avoid 2 C warming, we need to draw down that CO2e value. If we keep adding carbon to the atmosphere, we will hit considerably above 2 C by 2100. And even very rapid draw downs in fossil fuel burning will almost certainly not avoid 1.5 C warming. The present emissions trajectory leads us to around 4 C warming by 2100. Increasing emissions on a BAU track will put us at 5-7 C +. Fulfilling all the stated Paris goals might limit us to 3 C warming by 2100. But to get to 2 C or less we have to work much harder and transition to renewables much faster.

Greg

A great example reminder of a utility company seeing and being the future:
Green Mountain Power is trying to turn homes, neighborhoods and towns into virtual power plants, driven by economics as well as environmental goals.

redskylite

It was an eventful day when Chris Mooney started reporting for the Washington Post, and I have appreciated his reporting skills at interpreting into everyday layman’s language, many important climate related science reports and events as they have occurred. After all there are quite a few unscrupulous sources trying to minimize, dampen, suppress the mass of scientific research and observations, and the layman can be beguiled.

Another good report in today’s news regarding two recent researches, that quell optimize on limiting the temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius. the only piece I puzzled over where he seems to question the long standing 2 degree danger mark, without clarification. Although the danger is relative to where and who you are I have always regarded above 2 degrees to be extremely dangerous and have never questioned this. It certainly is if you live on a low lying Pacific atoll, Bangladesh shore, Sundarbans or you are a reindeer in the Arctic region. I think Chris should have made this much clearer in his report as it could be interpreted either way. Is it thick old me ? or does anyone else agree he is unclear on the 2 degree remarks.

“In recent years, it has become increasingly common to frame the climate change problem as a kind of countdown — each year we emit more carbon dioxide, narrowing the window for fixing the problem, but not quite closing it yet. After all, something could still change. Emissions could still start to plunge precipitously. Maybe next year.

This outlook has allowed, at least for some, for the preservation of a form of climate optimism, in which big changes, someday soon, will still make the difference. Christiana Figureres, the former head of the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change, recently joined with a group of climate scientists and policy wonks to state there are 3 years left to get emissions moving sharply downward. If, that is, we’re holding out hope of limiting the warming of the globe to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures, often cited as the threshold where “dangerous” warming begins (although in truth, that’s a matter of interpretation).
.. . . . . . .,

Two new studies published Monday, meanwhile, go further towards advancing this pessimistic view which asserts that there’s little chance of the world will stay within prescribed climate limits.”

redskylite

I think what’s most important is to draw down emissions as swiftly as possible. I think that’s the goal we should all be focused on.

2 C is definitely something you want to avoid. But we’re in a situation now where present forcing of 492 ppm CO2e locks that in by 2100 even if it is just maintained. Feedbacks, and some feedbacks will occur, will tend to push that number higher. If human fossil fuel activity were to halt very rapidly, we could see a very rapid fall out of 30-40 ppm CO2e of methane which would buy us a bit of a grace period against these Earth System feedbacks. But with warming to 1.5 C locked in, you’re kind of in a situation where you’re both bailing water into the boat and bailing it out.

It’s very likely that even with a rapid response we will pass the 1.5 C threshold. It’s likely, that unless human beings both rapidly transition to renewables AND learn how to pull carbon down out of the atmosphere at around 1 billion ton annual rates or more, we will hit 2 C by 2100.

This is cause for urgent action. But, at present, we are on a trajectory for around 4 C warming by 2100 and any return toward BAU burning will push that number higher.

wili

“NOAA Doppler weather radar data and surface observations indicate that Tropical Storm Emily made landfall with peak sustained winds of 45 mph at 10:45 AM EDT (1445 UTC) Monday on Anna Maria Island, just west of Bradenton, Florida. Emily spun into life on Monday morning at 8 am EDT just off the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Emily’s formation came just 48 hours after receiving no mention at all as a possible threat in the National Hurricane Center’s 8 am Saturday Tropical Weather Outlook.

Emily erupted along the Gulf of Mexico portion of a cold front that had pushed over Florida during the weekend, and took full advantage of very warm water temperatures near 30°C (86°F). Development was not expected due to high wind shear of 20 – 30 knots, plus very dry air at mid-levels of the atmosphere, where the relative humidity was near 45%.

Emily formed so quickly and unexpectedly that the Hurricane Hunters never flew into the storm. It is very unusual for a named storm to make landfall in the U.S. without the Hurricane Hunters ever sampling the storm.”

Shawn Redmond

This will likely be useful to more than just a few:
We are in the midst of a global information and knowledge crisis. Access to scientific research has never been more important to provide the basis for debates on critical issues such as climate change, global health, and renewable energies.

Abel Adamski

LONDON (Reuters) – Some European oil majors have made inroads into the emerging U.S. offshore wind energy market, aiming to leverage their experience of deepwater development and the crowded offshore wind arena at home.

Late entrants to the offshore wind game in Europe, which began with a project off Denmark 25 years ago and is now approaching maturity, they are looking across the Atlantic at what they view as a huge and potentially lucrative new market.

Norway’s Statoil (STL.OL) has won a license to develop a wind farm of the New York coast, is marketing its new floating turbine to California and Hawaii and is retraining some oil and gas staff to work in its wind division.

Royal Dutch Shell bid for a lease offshore North Carolina earlier this year while Denmark’s DONG Energy, a wind energy pioneer which agreed to sell its oil and gas business in May, is in a Massachusetts-based offshore wind consortium, holds a lease off the New Jersey coast and has opened an office in Boston.

Actually a good update on the US state of play in the wind arena where it is very early days

It would be nice if they stopped investing in new oil and gas projects all together and just jumped fully into new energy. Any new fossil fuel investments at this time represents locking in increasingly harmful and catastrophic outcomes.

It’s tough tangling with institutional reticence. On the one hand, you want to preserve the institutions that produce so much valuable knowledge and information. On the other hand, you want to goad those institutions into a higher level of wakefulness with regards to risks and valid concerns. I’ve certainly been burned more than once on this count despite stepping very carefully.

There are parallels between today’s and past greenhouse gas-driven climate changes

Burgess noticed that the beginning of the mass extinction, as well as a jolt to the carbon cycle and abrupt climate warming, coincided exactly with a switch in the style of volcanic activity in the Siberian Traps. During the initial 300,000 years of the eruptions, basalt lava poured over a vast area of Siberia building to several kilometers thick. In this time there was some stress to life in the Northern Hemisphere, but no mass extinction. Life only began to disappear across the globe at exactly the same time that lava stopped erupting above ground, and instead began to inject as sheets of magma underground.

In Siberia you have got the Tunguska Basin which is a thick package of sediments that contain carbon-bearing rocks like limestone and coal. When you start intruding magma, [it] cooks those sediments and liberates the volatiles. So the deadly interval of magma in the entire Large Igneous Province is the first material to intrude and pond into the shallow crust

In other words, it wasn’t the lava, it was the underground magma that started the killing, by releasing greenhouse gases.

Norwegian scientist Henrik Svensen had earlier identified hundreds of unusual volcanic vents called “diatreme pipes” all over Siberia that connected underground intrusions of magma (“sills”) to the atmosphere, showing signs of violent gas explosions. This new work emphasizes the importance of Svensen’s 2009 conclusions:

The diatremes that have been mapped are the geologic representation of that gas escape on a catastrophic level. Our hypothesis is that the first sills to be intruded are the ones that really do the killing [by] large scale gas escape likely via these diatremes.

“The Bureau of Meteorology’s monthly reports showed average maximum temperatures were 2.62 C degrees above the long-run average, beating the previous record set in 1975 by a full two-thirds of a degree.”

Sheri

In Phoenix area, last 10 days or more we have had a lot of overcast skies and some rain, sometimes very heavy in different areas of the area. The whole state has gotten rain sometimes very violent flash floods that have taken some lives. The chances for this continues for another week.

Sheri

In Phoenix area, last 10 days or more we have had a lot of overcast skies and some rain, sometimes very heavy in different areas of the area. The whole state has gotten rain sometimes very violent flash floods that have taken some lives. The chances for this continues for another week.

Sheri

In Phoenix area, last 10 days or more we have had a lot of overcast skies and some rain, sometimes very heavy in different areas of the area. The whole state has gotten rain sometimes very violent flash floods that have taken some lives. The chances for this continues for another week.